Welcome back everyone! Last week I kicked off a new series on deep space objects where I have included a terrestrial object in the foreground to help illustrate just how big these things are from our perspective here on Earth. This week I’m continuing with the Orion and surrounding nebulae, with the famous Mount LeConte in the foreground, as seen from the Foothills Parkway. Let me start this week by pointing out the objects in the sky. Going left to right, the bright orange object is known as the Flame nebula. If you look up high-res images of just that nebula, it literally looks like a fire in the sky. To its right and down just a bit is the Horse Head nebula (if you look closely you’ll see what looks like the knight chess piece, facing to the left), and then to its right are actually two nebulae, the Running Man nebula (I don’t get the name for this one) and the Orion nebula. If you think of the blueish area as a giant tick, the head is the Running Man, and the body is Orion. If you see Orion in the night sky, the three stars of Orion’s belt would run diagonally up and right from the Flame nebula (just out of frame), and the Orion nebula is what appears to your eyes as the second star in Orion’s belt… except it’s not a star, its a giant tick! LOL
Last week’s nebula, I mentioned, is over 5,000 light years from Earth. The Orion nebula, however, is much closer. It lies a mere 1,300-ish light years away, and is the closest region of star formation to us hereon Earth. That means that the light collected in this image left its source in the 670s, when all sorts of random things were happening around the globe.
Now that you at least have names for what you’re looking at, let’s talk about what it is that you’re looking at. Nebula can occur in different ways and from different “events” (stars dying, stars forming, etc), but essentially what you’re seeing is collections of dust and gasses that are being ionized (lit up) by nearby stars. So imagine seeing a rainbow, where light is bouncing off of water particles in the sky at specific angles, and it’s a somewhat similar affair, but with all sorts of different things being lit up, rather than just water. If you really want to geek out about this, check out this Wikipedia article, and then Google some of the nebulae names I’ve mentioned above.
Finally, the question of how… and you guessed it, I’ll answer that next week!
–Dan Thompson